Kick off your summer play with awesome STEAM Activities! This fantastic salad spinner art is easy to make with simple materials. Combine art with science, and learn about forces. Look for our free STEAM guide below.

Salad Spinner Art
Combine a popular kitchen tool and a bit of physics for cool art and science that everyone is sure to love! Take this STEAM activity outside on a nice day!
Supplies:
- Salad Spinner
- Paint
- Paper Plates
How to Make Paint Spinner Art
STEP 1: Place the salad spinner on a flat surface and put a paper plate in the bottom of it. Alternatively, you can cut a piece of paper to fit in the bottom.


STEP 2: Time for the paint! Add drips and drops of paint all around the surface of the paper plate.

STEP 3: When you are satisfied with the amount of paint, close up the salad spinner tightly. Get spinning!

You can check on your masterpiece and see if you need to add more paint. What happens if you thin the paint first with a bit of water. Does changing the viscosity or thickness of the paint have a different effect?

Simple Physics of Salad Spinner Art
Let’s apply Newton’s Laws of Motion to this summer STEAM project with salad spinner art. An object in motion stays in motion unless a force is acted upon it. Our paint spinner is a great example of inertia.
You might be tempted to think that this salad spinner art is also an art project in centrifugal force, but it’s not quite! A salad spinner does use centrifugal force to separate water from the leaves of lettuce. But this STEAM project doesn’t use wet lettuce!
Centrifugal force describes the tendency of an object following a curved path to fly away from the center point. Here the colors on the paper plate are pushed outward when the salad spinner turns, causing the colors to mix together.
More Fun with Forces
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Free Printable STEAM Activity Guide
Start with STEAM today, and use this handy STEAM guide to plan your next activity!
STEAM Activities You Can Do With Your Kids
There are many ways to check out STEAM activities (complete list), or try one of these listed below and grab the printable guide as a handy reference.
- LEGO Drawing Shadows STEAM Activity
- Explore Biology with Plant Cells and Animal Cells
- Create a Bouquet of Coffee Filter Flowers
- Make an Art Robot
- Use Binary Code to Craft Ornaments or Bracelets
- Craft Atoms
- Explore Architecture: Eiffel Tower
- 3d paper sculpture
- Make a Balanced Mobile
- Play with a Mobius Strip
- Fizzy Sidewalk Paint for outdoor STEAM















